Jeff Adair: Blaming the poor

Jeff Adair

Saturday

Sep 27, 2008 at 12:01 AMSep 27, 2008 at 2:58 AM

Maybe I'm a little thin-skinned. In all honesty, I shouldn't take it personally. I should consider the sources. But I'm growing a little tired of people blaming minorities for all the ills that affect our society.

Maybe I'm a little thin-skinned. In all honesty, I shouldn't take it personally. I should consider the sources. But I'm growing a little tired of people blaming minorities for all the ills that affect our society.

Take, for example, the financial mess in which our country finds itself. It's so bad, our president proposes to print new money, $700 billion to be exact, to bail out Wall Street.

I'm no economist. Maybe a bailout is necessary to keep this country rolling.

But, I ask: Who's to blame for the crisis?

No, it's not the Wall Street fat cats. No, it's not those politicians who believe all government regulation is bad, the group that left it up to the foxes to guard the hens.

And no, it's not a culture that says you don't have to save, you can have it all now. Just pull out the plastic card, or take out a home equity loan, and bingo, no worries, no pain.

"The cause of our current financial problems are Democrat changes in regulation demanding that more and more financial institutions lend money to 'the poor,' 'the minorities' and others who couldn't pay it back," wrote one recent e-mailer, a person I know who describes himself as an "unwashed conservative."

OK, I have no doubt the response to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, created to prevent discrimination in lending, probably contributed to the mess even though it was created 31 years ago, and even though more than half the subprime loans came from companies not covered by the CRA.

But come on, no one was holding a gun to lenders' heads. No one was complaining during the boom times. No one was saying, "We don't want the commission signing up new borrowers into high risk loans."

Au contraire, says an Investor's Business Daily story. "Banks became pliable, easy targets. No bank CEO wanted to be mau-maued as an enemy of the poor. They became shakedown targets."

It was a "vast extortion scheme" against America's banks, according to former Texas Sen. Phil Graham.

Wow! Poor, uneducated folks have power. So much that they brought the center of America's financial might to its knees. Wow! This must be backward day. The poor call the shots.

"This crisis was caused by political correctness forced on the mortgage lending industry in the Clinton era," wrote bomb thrower Ann Coulter in a recent column. "Instead of looking at 'outdated criteria,' such as the mortgage applicant's credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named 'Caylee."'

A good jump shot? Ouch! That hurts. Good job Ann hiding what you really mean. Good job with the code.

The bottom line is this mess was not created by a single political party, racial group, economic bracket grouping or single policy.

There's plenty of blame to spread among many sectors of society.

Jeff Adair is a Daily News editor and writer. He can be reached at jadair@cnc.com.

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